A/B testing on WordPress: a framework for developers and tutorial

Some months ago, I changed one link in the menu in my website postpaycounter.com. After that, it looked to me more people were purchasing products, i.e. the conversion rate had increased. But how to check whther that was really the case, or if it was just an accident/impression? Use an A/B test, I told myself!

With an A/B test, half of the users are served one version of the page, the one with the old link, and half of them another version of it, the one with the new link in place. When a sale happens, we may then log that as a success for the kind of page that was used, be it the A version or the B one.

In my case, the two versions of the page simply consisted of two different links in the menu, while I wanted the success to be logged when the user purchased something (I use Easy Digital Downloads to handle purchases).

I could find a bunch of plugins that allowed to set up A/B tests, but they all seemed pretty difficult to customize from a developer perspective, and I was already seeing myself wrestling with someone else’s code that provide tons of features useless to me, but through which was nearly impossible to interact with Easy Digital Downloads. So I decided to build my own, simple implementation, with the aim of it being tailored to developers rather than users who needed an interface.

An A/B test implementation example

This is an example of how to use the little framework. To set up a test, you only need to provide two functions:

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Tutorial: Use PayPal Adaptive Payments API (with Embedded Lightbox)

There are two things I am currently working on:

School
Integrating my Post Pay Counter WordPress plugin with PayPal, so that site administrators can pay their writers directly from their blog pages, without having to head to the PayPal website

Apparently, it turns out that you do not get to choose how much time you want to dedicate to the first point. That, matched with the fact that PayPal APIs are horrible and that the documentation is often useless, is making the whole process much longer than I thought. Meanwhile, I am sharing what I have come up with until now (which works pretty well, actually), scheduling a second part of the tutorial for when the job will be completed.

PayPal Adaptive Payments: what it is for

Adaptive payments handles payments between a sender of a payment and one or more receivers of the payment. You are an application owner, such as a merchant that owns a website, the owner of a widget on a social networking site, the provider of a payment application on mobile phones, and so on. Your application is the caller of Adaptive Payments API operations.

Standing to what I have been able to discover about PayPal’s different payment mechanisms over summer, Adaptive Payments represents the most flexible way to transfer funds from one account to another. Also, it seems the only method you can effectively integrate PayPal in your application. Adaptive Payments is in fact for those applications in which your account, as application developer, is not the one you are drawing funds from. Shortly, you need to move money on behalf of someone, and your application is the intermediary.

In my specific case, I needed a way to let administrators put their credentials into my plugin and have PayPal let me get money from their accounts and transfer it to their writers’ ones. Adaptive Payments method was really suitable because it allows six transactions per each request, so that it is possible to send different amounts to several people with only one API request. As bottom line (which I did not need and did not care to dive into), it also allows Chained Payments, in which the primary receiver passes part of the payment to other receivers, splitting the original amount.

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When you start a new project, think big!

As you may know, I am the happy developer of a WordPress plugin called Post Pay Counter. I dare say that that has been my first serious coding project, well thought and well written. It taught me a lot, above all the concept that when you start a new project, you should think as if it was going to become a huge one. This is what I’d like to share with you today.

When I started developing the Post Pay Counter project it was two years ago. I took it up because a friend of mine needed it, and asked me if I could set up a plugin that could simplify writers payments. That was how the project started. Looking back at that time, I can clearly identify an error that came along with me and, partly, is still with me today: the idea that was not going to be an important plugin, that I would not have edited it much after, that I would not have added almost anything… that so it was, so it would have remained. What did this practically mean?

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